Patch Just Had A Really Nice Mayhttp://www.businessinsider.com/patch-had-a-really-nice-april-2012-6/comments
en-usWed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500Tue, 31 Mar 2015 14:57:56 -0400Nicholas Carlsonhttp://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fdf55a969beddf42d000007Record! 14% YOY GrowthMon, 18 Jun 2012 12:22:01 -0400http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fdf55a969beddf42d000007
Just what the shareholders want to see on a property that lost $120,000,000 in 2011. Interesting how that translates into the predicted 100% YOY growth. Wild guess. They are dumping tons of Ad.com remnant inventory into the site and linking out like crazy to the Aol Homepage to drive some traffic.
Hope TA has another billion worth of patents in his back pocket. (Side note Microsoft marked up half the patents and resold them to Facebook, so Aol didn't even maximize that "long cigar." Pretty sad when Microsoft eats your lunch.)http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd8de776bb3f7db6f000007Rattling The CageWed, 13 Jun 2012 14:39:51 -0400http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd8de776bb3f7db6f000007
I wanna see how these numbers split between AOL Client and the Browser. My guess is that it is somewhat like 95 to 5. Which means the links on the Welcome Screen.
That's the only thing AOL has ever hadhttp://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd73a9c69bedd121c000006Pachouli DeetTue, 12 Jun 2012 08:48:28 -0400http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd73a9c69bedd121c000006
Ho Hum... the Patch PR team is still employed. For February, 2012 Wikipedia ranked number 7 with 87M UV's according to Comscore. Wonder how many donations they earned over the previous year. Point is, traffic numbers are meaningless unless it directly correlates to significant revenue increase. I still think the model of serving local market residents with real news source is a noble. Just don't think Patch/AOL has the leadership ability to acomplish the task at hand. Sell it to Douglas Manchester or someone with very deep pockets.http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd654dd69beddd90d000001Facts Anyone?Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:28:13 -0400http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd654dd69beddd90d000001
Patch's traffic can be explained easily : Aol has been more aggressively directing traffic from Aol.com to the Patch network, and if one Unique Visitor goes to five Patch sites they count as five UV's.
The timing of this press release seems mighty suspicious to me as Aol is usually extremely quiet on the Patch front unless they are on an earnings call.
The revenue number is a joke - even if they do 200% of last years number it's only about $30 million. Aol has dumped a quarter of a billion dollars into Patch in the last 3 years and with numbers like this it will take 2 decades for Patch to break even.
Patch employees have been getting fired steadily over the last month and a half. Sales people and managers have been fired (in some cases demoted) and editorial people have been shown the door as well. On top of all of this Patch employees have been quitting left and right since the beginning of 2012(anyone can do a simple LinkedIn search). Almost the entire Ad-ops team has left, the lead editor, the head of the inside sales team, and countless other sales and editorial folks.
The hyper local strategy of Patch won't scale. It's fixed costs are too high and its content is too shitty.http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd64554ecad04527b000009Unique Visitors?Mon, 11 Jun 2012 15:21:56 -0400http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd64554ecad04527b000009
Depends on how the numbers are calculated. Comscore allows you to group Patch sites together to get a de-duped UV statistic for the combined Patch sites.
What I think is really going on is that they just had more referals from existing AOL sites, especially the home page. That's always been AOL's trick -- promote a new site on the homepage and watch its UVs soar but almost never building anything which is actually sticky enough to grow organically.http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd61deb69bedd237200000cCommon SenseMon, 11 Jun 2012 12:33:47 -0400http://www.businessinsider.com/c/4fd61deb69bedd237200000c
The numbers are a joke. The unique visitors are per site, and they link to each other and post articles across a network, thus unique visitors are counted multiple times. One person clicks on 5 different articles, and that goes to 5 different Patch's, and thus 5 uniques are counted for one person. A regional newspaper site can get the same actual eyes on their site but not have the gimmicks to have 15,000 uniques per town. its BS.